Thank you for the question.
The work on the legislative package before Parliament got under way almost a dozen years ago. It was following an accident in Nova Scotia in which a worker in a workplace was killed. In that particular accident, the accord acts originally separated operational safety, the operations of the technical units and things that are happening in the offshore, which was embedded within the accord acts, and occupational health and safety as a separate area which fell under the provincial jurisdiction.
In the workplace, in this particular instance and in several instances, there was some potential for what we call the grey area, or what was exposed as a grey area at that point a dozen years ago. Was the worker working in the workplace who received an injury, and who in this case was killed, under occupational health and safety, which was provincial legislation, or was that worker actually working on an operational issue, on operational safety, which is under the accord act legislation, which we would think as federal and the province would think as provincial.
The confusion between whether it was occupational health and safety or whether it was operational was what led to an inability to kind of follow through with this particular instance in a way that left all the governments, all the labour groups together, and all the operators believing this needed to be addressed.
That led to a 12-year process in which, over a number of iterations and through sustained discussions with the provinces of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador, the worker community and the operators, the legislation proposed a series of amendments that would take the existing provincial legislation in some cases, existing guidelines in other cases, existing regulations under different acts and embed them and draft them into the accord acts. For the offshore it would be clear that occupational health and safety fit the unique circumstances, and that it fit within the context, but also managed to live within the spirit of the original accord acts, which was that social legislation was going to respect the provincial jurisdiction to the extent it could.
That's something we tried to preserve in the drafting of the bill and in the materials that were in it. The provinces likewise did the same.
It was a fairly extensive process through a number of years. It had reached certain points, in the mid-2007 era, when the bill appeared to be ready to be brought forward, but there was a need to further strengthen the governance on the labour side of the bill. Another series of amendments was proposed and drafted.
Our colleagues in Justice have been on the file for a number of years with the department.